OT: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Encrypted archives?

[Zenaan Harkness]

> I was just wondering if it was possible to setup encryped archives?

This is a classic case of orthogonal functionality.

My recommendation: learn to do loopback filesystems. Then learn to do
encrypted filesystems.

* Loopback mounting is very, very useful - testing iso cd images,
mounting ripped CDs when you just want one file and don't want to burn a
whole CD just to get that file, and of course encrypted filesystems.

* Crypto filesystems are so much more general than "encrypted tla
archive" it isn't funny. Of course, you will find other uses for them.
This is one I never quite got to, so I can't make personal
experience-based recommendations.

* Finally, if you haven't come across it yet, I HIGHLY recommend the
swiss army knife of scripting tools, opening up an entire world of
possibilities (that have saved my ass on a few occasions - eg. when I've
had to rescue a GNU/Linux box and all I had was an NT box), is netcat
(aka "nc"). Combined with cpio (or tar, but cpio is simpler when you're
in a pike - I recommend TomsRootBoot rescue floppy), gzip, gpg and any
other command line tools that you normally pipe things through, netcat
is bloody awesome.

Orthogonaly people. Repeat after me: or-tho-go-na-li-ty.

If you've every piped find to grep, then learned to add in xargs, and
realised that the xargs and grep bit fit nicely with tla inventory, and
also that you can tack "> tmpfile.txt" on the end of your chain of
pipes, you are 98% of the way there already. You can add in
cpio/tar/star, gpg, gzip/bzip/zip/etc, and the list goes on. All lovely
interchangeable tools. And nc/netcat allows one part of a chain to be a
network between two computers. Much like ssh tunneling is, although
that's kind of the difference between cpio and emacs (alright, may be
cpio and tar, but you hopefully get the picture); the point being, these
are basically similar (haven't done it for a while, so it's almost
certainly missing the precise options):

host recver: nc -l port|gpg --decrypt|cpio -imuvd
host sender: find blah|cpio -o|gpg --encrypt|nc host port

vs

host recver: ssh??|cpio -imuvd
host sender: find blah|cpio -o|ssh ??


As you can tell, I've used the orthogonal solution here, not the ssh
version. In fact, the ssh version might require netcat as well anyway
(which would communicate at either end with "localhost", which is just
the SSH tunnel).

cheers
zen